a moment of clarity

Purgatory

As you may or may not know/care, I have an office sort of job. I get to do it from home, but there are still meetings to attend and projects to work on.

While waiting for a meeting to start last week, I decided that this was a form of purgatory.

Purgatory (office definitions)

1 – The window of time before a meeting. This time slot is generally too long to justify taking a break but too short to begin work on a new task. There is a corollary to Murphy’s Law that states any task begun during pre-meeting purgatory will take far longer than anticipated and require far more effort.

2 – The “hurry up and wait” portion of project execution. This purgatory is created when a deadline is looming, however the ball is in any court but your own and you have no influence over moving the project to the next step. All you can do is wait, ready to pounce on any shred of data that comes your way. This purgatory has a special level where you are required to spend more time developing reports and charts to show why the work isn’t getting done than you actually spend on any real work.

Not only am I in work purgatory, I’m noticing a similar situation in WoW.

By a miracle of the other officers getting frustrated with the 25 situation and our decision to get back to 10s, I am suddenly back from the brink of apathy and given the green light to return to raiding on my mage.

Fond memories of Wrath raiding, with 10 and 25 man lockouts being met on multiple toons in multiple raids, made me feel warm and fuzzy.

I’m chomping at the virtual bit, ready to get this show on the road.

We threw together a raid the other night and I got to bring Arioch in.

My damage wasn’t anything to get excited about, but I was above the tanks and didn’t die to stupid. Hell, on Cho’gall, when the add tank was actually taking care of Depravity interrupts I made it to P2 with 0 corruption.

I only sometimes got twitchy watching tank health and never actually tried to bubble someone. (FYI – if you see my mage casting random spells it means I shifted into heal mode for a second and muscle memory is a bitch.)

Made it through Halfus and Valiona/Theralion just fine, one-shotting each, and then pain starts shooting through my back and leg. At random points in combat I couldn’t see the screen or move the mouse while waiting for my whole body to relax from the spasm.

Thankfully it only took a couple attempts each on the Council and Cho’Gall (training new tank) but about halfway through the Cho’Gall fights I broke down and had to take a pill just to remain upright.

(The next night we went into BWD and I made it through the whole night with fewer spasms and much better performance.)

So I’m in WoW purgatory.

There’s a shit ton of stuff I want to do.

I’m excited about getting gear and more pets and mounts and achievements and titles and tabards and useless little vanity items.

I even signed up for the guild’s rated BG group and looked at how much resilience I can get off the base honor set.

But I can’t sit still for more than 20 minutes at a time without whimpering.

There’s an incredibly sweet and juicy carrot dangling there in front of me and I can’t reach out and grab it.

So frustrating.

I call a conspiracy.

(I’m in physical therapy for my back and feeling better already. Now I just need to watch my time spent on the computer to make sure I’m not stressing the muscles out any more than I have to.)